Welcome to the Performance Testing Guidance for Web Applications! This guide shows you an end-to-end approach for implementing performance testing. Whether you are new to performance testing, or looking for ways to improve your current performance testing approach, you will find insights that you can tailor for your specific scenarios. This guide is related to our Performance Testing Guidance Project.

Why We Wrote This Guide

We wrote this guide to accomplish the following:

To consolidate real-world lessons learned around performance testing.

To present a roadmap for end-to-end performance testing.

To narrow the gap between state of the art and state of the practice.

Features of This Guide

Approach for performance testing. The guide provides an approach that organizes performance testing into logical units to help you incrementally adopt performance testing throughout your application life cycle.

Principles and practices. These serve as the foundation for the guide and provide a stable basis for recommendations. They also reflect successful approaches used in the field.

Processes and methodologies. These provide steps for managing and conducting performance testing. For simplification and tangible results, they are broken down into activities with inputs, outputs, and steps. You can use the steps as a baseline or to help you evolve your own process.

Life cycle approach. The guide provides end-to-end guidance on managing performance testing throughout your application life cycle, to reduce risk and lower total cost of ownership (TCO).

Modular. Each chapter within the guide is designed to be read independently. You do not need to read the guide from beginning to end to benefit from it. Use the parts you need.

Holistic. The guide is designed with the end in mind. If you do read the guide from beginning to end, it is organized to fit together in a comprehensive way. The guide, in its entirety, is better than the sum of its parts.

Subject matter expertise. The guide exposes insight from various experts throughout Microsoft and from customers in the field.